Why Write?

Not too long ago, filmmaker Joel Coen said,“One of the pleasures of movies is creating a world . . . it gives you a license to do certain things.” While the most common explanation offered as to why people feel the need to write is to communicate, I think the reasons may often be closer to Coen's description of the pleasures of filmmaking. The creation of a world. The license to do certain things.

There are those who claim they wouldn't know where to start if they were to write and others who can not stop themselves. There were years when I wrote consistently, followed by years of responsibilities that left little time to create worlds in my mind, let alone write about them. And then, something remarkable happened. Just as some of the demands on my time lifted, a story was dropped before me. As touched on in other posts here, the details about my mother's birth family contain enough material for at least three novels or screenplays. Yet, every time I begin writing a semi-fictionalized version about it in one form or another, new information is discovered that changes things. The revelations usually make things more intriguing and often less plausible, yet true. It feels like trying to grab hold of water.

In the meantime, I started writing about other things, other people and places. I began my blog and worked on short screenplays. I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing a 50,000 word, 175 page novel in one month. It felt comfortable to be back in that place where you can move between your reality and an alternate reality that's being built line by line, page by page. And sometimes deleted and rebuilt as something entirely different.

When I was looking for a graphic for this post, I inadvertently found myself looking at photos, sketches, and paintings of women writing in a variety of places, from a number of centuries. Studying the images is fascinating. Who were these women? What were they writing? Letters, stories, prayers, poetry,...confessions? One thing that seemed consistent was that each one was engrossed in her writing. It was as if the passion to express or create something on paper was the common thread that tied women writers together from ancient Greece to the present. In the painting I finally settled on, there's a duality. While one woman writes fervently at a table, her servant looks out the window. One is looking out at the world as it is, the other perhaps writing about an entirely different world. Whatever she wrote may have never been read and was most probably lost in time. Yet her image remains, pen to paper, writing without end.